[vox-tech] graphics card suggestion for 1920x1200

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 04:02:55PM -0400, Mike Simons wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 10:21:29AM -0700, jeremic@ucdavis.edu wrote:
> > I just got a SONY sdm-P232W LCD monitor and was wondering if anyone can
> > suggest a graphics card for this one.
> 
> Boris,
> 
>   Not being very into graphics cards, I would recommend some ATI brand
> card, since they have open 3D drivers, which will be better for you
> long term.  I would avoid NVidia since they have closed 3D drivers.
>   Performance to day is not as important as being able to use your card
> in 2 years when NVidia decides to stop forward porting their fast (but
> proprietary) crap.

Not open != crap.  At least, not in the sense it usually used in, i.e.
buggy or feature-impaired.  And their drivers *are* fast, damn fast.

As for Nvidia not supporting their cards down the road?  Highly friggin'
unlikely.  They use a "unified driver architecture" (their buzzwords)
and their current drivers support everything from the original tnt up to
the current GeForce FX.  I don't know exactly when the tnt chip came
out, but I used a tnt *2* one helluva lot longer back than 2 years ago.

As for features?  Twinview, Tvout all work out of the box.  I've never
been able to get Tvout working on my laptop Radeon 7000.  (That sucks,
'cause frozen bubble on the bigscreen is cool...)

Now there were problems early on with Nvidia's Linux drivers and this is
the source of Nvidia's bad rap.  Some kernel people (Alan Cox in
particular) were getting rightfully annoyed when people would want help
with "kernel" AGP bugs while using Nvidia's driver.  Obviously, debugging
with a proprietary black box driver is annoying and difficult.  So don't
expect any LKLM help with kernel issues while running Nvidia's driver.

Trying not to sound like a groupie here but Nvidia shows a dedicated
interest in supporting their hardware on Linux, most unlike ATI who
tack on truly "crappy" drivers to their woefully standards-miscompliant
web site as an afterthought.

BTW, There *is* an open nvidia driver, it's in xfree86 and it's called
'nv'  But as you alluded to, it is not 3d accelerated.

-troy